Piracy

Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc.

PIRACY

PIRACY. Piracy was a prominent feature of the Mediterranean world up through the nineteenth century. The relative poverty of the soil, the inviting expanse of the sea with its lively commercial life, and the many hiding places provided by the islets scattered across the area—particularly in the Aegean—ensured that the coastal inhabitants would always be tempted by the life of the pirate. Such low-level raiding, as constant and predictable as it was, is almost an environmental given rather than a phenomenon that begs the attention of the historian. At times, however, piracy spilled beyond such narrow limits and became a vital instrument of state building or state destruction. At such times in the Mediterranean, any explanation of historical change must include piracy in the narrative.

The early modern period in Mediterranean history—roughly the fifteenth through the eighteenth century—begins with the tapering off of one such period of piratical recrudescence. The final crumbling of Byzantine maritime power in the fourteenth century encouraged fierce competition between Latin Christians and Turkish emirs for
control of the Aegean and its vital trade links. Both sides built up their navies, raided each other's territory, and preyed on each other's shipping in pursuit of supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean. Both sides recruited pirates (conveniently called corsairs once they were serving a legitimate political entity) to help them achieve their goals. The Knights of St. John, for instance, captured the island of Rhodes in 1308 with the help of a Genoese corsair (Inalcik, p. 186). The eventual victor in this fierce competition was the Turkish side, specifically the Ottoman Turks whose original base was inland but who eventually expanded outward to become a maritime power of the first order. With the conquest of Constantinople (1453), the Ottomans became masters of the vital commercial routes that linked the Black Sea and the Aegean. In 1522 they vanquished one of their most persistent naval competitors when Suleiman the Magnificent captured Rhodes and forced the departure of the Knights. Venice continued to have possessions in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Ottomans steadily eroded her power as well.

Having thus established control over the area, the Sultans quite naturally no longer looked with favor upon piracy and punished pirates whenever they were able to do so. Those who could be absorbed into the state apparatus—as naval commanders, for example—enjoyed a new life as Ottoman officials. Independent actors, however, were no longer tolerated. In 1504 the Ottomans seized the ships of a pirate who had served as a corsair in the recent wars with Venice. When he continued his raids in peacetime, he lost not only his ships; the authorities burned his house to the ground and executed seventy of his men (Brummett, p. 99). Ottoman maritime supremacy, combined with the Venetian desire to protect her commercial interests, ensured that the eastern Mediterranean enjoyed a long hiatus from piracy in the sixteenth century.

Farther to the west, in North Africa, the picture was largely similar. The corsairing captains who had raided the Spanish coastland on behalf of the Ottomans now settled down to life as the rulers of the newly acquired territories in North Africa. The high level of hostility between the sultan and the Spanish kings, however, meant that piracy was more tolerated in the western Mediterranean.

Things changed again after the Ottoman defeat at the battle of Lepanto (1571). Revisionist historiography has made it clear that this clash was not the watershed it was once presumed to be. It was important, however, in terms of piracy. The staggering and ever increasing costs of galley warfare convinced both the Ottomans and the Spaniards that it was best to turn their energies elsewhere. The Mediterranean was left to its own devices. The pirates once again took to the seas, and the seventeenth century was the golden age of the pirate republic. The slave markets of Algiers and of Valletta teemed with miserable captives from the other side, as both Muslims and Christians pursued their opponents with equal ferocity.

To a certain extent the pirates of the seventeenth century were operating on their own initiative and were motivated by the issues of economic scarcity that had always figured prominently. As with earlier centuries, however, shifts in the Mediterranean balance of power were working themselves out through piracy. It was in this period that northern newcomers—the Dutch and the English—put an end to Italian commercial supremacy in the Mediterranean and piracy was a vital instrument in this assault. The English pirate in his berton became a hated and feared figure for the Venetian merchant. This northern invasion is only the bestknown example, however. France backed Catholic pirates—particularly the Knights of St. John—as part of its ambition to replace the Venetians as the preeminent Catholic power in the eastern Mediterranean, and to hurt her economic competitors. The North African regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers would prove similarly useful for English and French ambitions. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these two powers signed a number of treaties with the North Africans, agreements that were designed both to protect their own merchants from North African piracy and to encourage raids on their competitors' shipping. In the eighteenth century the power of the regencies dwindled as they themselves devoted fewer and fewer resources to such assaults and European supremacy became ever more evident. Nevertheless, remnants of the system were still at work as late as the American Revolution. Once the Americans declared their independence from the British, Lloyds of London discreetly informed the North Africans that American ships were no longer under the protection of the British navy. North African attacks on
the merchant shipping of the new republic predictably ensued.

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte captured the island of Malta and took the previously unimaginable step of freeing all the Muslim captives held by the Knights of St. John. His dramatic actions were an illustration of a more prosaic truth. By the end of the eighteenth century combatants in the Mediterranean were strong enough to fight their naval battles and conduct their trade without the help of Mediterranean pirates turned corsairs. Once the state turned its back, piracy never again achieved the international significance that it had enjoyed from time to time in the early modern period.

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piracy

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

piracy, robbery committed or attempted on the high seas. It is distinguished from privateering in that the pirate holds no commission from and receives the protection of no nation but usually attacks vessels of all nations.

As the line between privateering and piracy is often hard to draw, any act of doubtful legality committed on the seas is apt to be characterized as piracy. Thus the sinking of merchant vessels by the Germans in World War I was characterized by some as piracy, although the act was done on the authority of a national state. However, at the Washington Conference of 1921 a treaty was concluded that declared that improper visit and search (see search, right of) by one in the service of any power would constitute piracy.

Since piracy is a crime against humanity, those practicing it may be tried in any competent court, regardless of nationality. To the forms of piracy defined by international law, however, a nation may add offenses committed on board its own vessels or in its own territorial waters.

History

Because it is often the result of failure or laxity in patrolling sea routes, piracy flourished in times of unrest, or when navies ordinarily protecting commerce were engaged in war. Pirates found their most suitable base of operations in an archipelago that offered shelter together with proximity to trade routes. Pirates preyed upon Phoenician and Greek commerce and were so active in the 1st cent. BC that Rome itself was almost starved by their interception of the grain convoys.

Pompey swept piracy from the Mediterranean, but with the decline of the Roman empire it revived there and was prevalent until modern times. Muslim pirates infested the W Mediterranean; the Venetians, who ostensibly policed the E Mediterranean, preyed upon the maritime trade of rival cities; and the Barbary States got much of their revenue from piracy. In the North, the Vikings harassed the commerce of the Baltic Sea and the English Channel. Emerging in the 13th cent., the Hanseatic League succeeded in curbing the piracy of its era.

New trade routes opened during the Renaissance, e.g., the shipment of precious metals from the Spanish colonies, the rich trade with the East, and the development of the slave trade, that made piracy especially lucrative. At this period no great stigma was attached to piracy because maritime law had not been systematized. This fact, together with the increasing colonial rivalry of the powers, led states to countenance those pirates who promoted the national cause by attacking the commerce of rival nations. With the tacit approval of the provincial authorities, the West Indies became a pirates' rendezvous, and the English buccaneers of the Spanish Main in the 17th and 18th cent., who despoiled the Spanish treasure armadas and pillaged Spanish-American coast settlements, returned to England to divide their spoils with the crown and to receive the royal pardon.

The development of national navies caused the decline of piracy. Beginning in 1803, the United States endeavored to crush the corsairs of Tripoli. In 1815 and 1816 the United States, the Netherlands, and Great Britain wiped out the Barbary pirates, who had exacted tribute under the threat of capturing ships and imprisoning their crews. In 1816, Great Britain and the United States began operations against pirates in the West Indies, particularly those on the Cuban coast, and in 1824 the United States sent David Porter to complete the task. The power of the pirates along the Straits of Malacca and the China seas was broken after the Opium Wars in the late 19th cent. During the Spanish Civil War the major powers agreed (1937) at the Nyon Conference on an antipiracy pact after mysterious attacks on merchant ships in the Mediterranean. Small-scale piracy has persisted in some waters, particularly off Indonesia and SE and S Asia, in the Red Sea and off Somalia, and in the Gulf of Guinea off W Africa. In the early 21st cent. the lawlessness in Somalia led to the rise there, initially mainly in the Gulf of Aden but subsequently over much of the NW Indian Ocean, of more significant organized piracy for ransom. Several nations stationed warships offshore to combat it and protect the Suez shipping lanes, and merchant ships traveling in the region began carrying armed guards, leading to a large drop in ship seizures by 2012.

Famous Real and Fictional Pirates

Famous names appearing in the long history of piracy include Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins, the Elizabethan buccaneers, Edward Mansfield, Henry Morgan, Jacques Nau, Jean Laffite, and Edward Teach (Blackbeard). There is some doubt as to whether the activities of Captain Kidd constituted piracy.

The pirate is a frequent figure in literature, especially in books written for children. Perhaps the most famous fictional pirate is Long John Silver in R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island. Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper each wrote a novel entitled The Pirate, Charles Kingsley wrote of buccaneers in Westward Ho!, and Sir William Gilbert ridiculed pirate stories in his Pirates of Penzance.

Bibliography

See H. A. Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient World (1924); P. Gosse, The History of Piracy (1932, repr. 1968); C. H. Karraker, Piracy Was a Business (1953); A. L. Hayward, The Book of Pirates (1956); R. Carse, The Age of Piracy (1957, repr. 1965); H. Cochran, Freebooters of the Red Sea (1965); A. G. Course, Pirates of the Eastern Seas (1966); D. Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (2009); J. Bahadur, The Pirates of Somalia (2011).

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Piracy

West's Encyclopedia of American Law
COPYRIGHT 2005 The Gale Group, Inc.

PIRACY

The act of violence or depredation on the high seas; also, the theft ofintellectual property, especially in electronic media.

Piracy is a crime with ancient origins. As long as there have been ships at sea, pirates have sought to steal from them. Internationally, laws against piracy have ancient origins, too, but U.S. law developed chiefly in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The power to criminalize piracy originated in the U.S. Constitution, which was followed by the first federal law in 1790 and crucial revisions over the next sixty years. Additionally, the United States and other nations cooperated to combat piracy in the twentieth century. This resulted in a unique shared view of jurisdiction: piracy on the high

seas can be punished by any nation. In the late twentieth century, the term piracy grew to include copyright violations of intellectual property such as music, films, and computer software.

The Constitution addresses piracy in Article 1, Section 8. It gives Congress "the Power … To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations." Generally, the definition of pirates meant rogue operators at sea—independent criminals who hijacked ships, stole their cargo, or committed violence against their crew. But standards in all areas under the law changed in response to judicial rulings and to historical incidents, forming by the mid-1800s what became the basis for contemporary law.

In 1790 Congress enacted the first substantive antipiracy law, a broad ban on murder and robbery at sea that carried the death penalty. In 1818, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the law was limited to crimes involving U.S. citizens: U.S. jurisdiction did not cover foreigners whose piracy targeted other foreigners (United States v. Palmer, 16 U.S. [3 Wheat.] 610). A year later, in 1819, Congress responded by passing an antipiracy law to extend U.S. jurisdiction over pirates of all nationalities.

By the mid-nineteenth century, two other important changes occurred. Penalties for certain piracy crimes—revolt and mutiny—were reduced and were no longer punishable by death. Then the Mexican War of 1846–48 brought a radical extension of the definition of a pirate. The traditional definition of an independent criminal was broadened to include sailors acting on commissions from foreign nations, if and when their commissions violated U.S. treaties with their government. The Piracy Act of 1847, which established this broader definition, marked the last major change in U.S. piracy law.

Today, the primary source of antipiracy law is title 18, chapter 81, of the United States Code, although numerous other antipiracy provisions are scattered throughout the code. Additionally, international cooperation has shaped a unique form of jurisdictional agreement among nations. Significant in bringing about this cooperation was the geneva convention on the High Seas of April 29, 1958 and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The primary effect of such agreements is to allow pirates to be apprehended on the high seas—meaning outside of territorial limits—by the authorities of any nation and punished under its own law. This standard is unique because nations are generally forbidden by international law from interfering with the vessels of another nation on the high seas. It arose because piracy itself has never vanished; in fact, since the 1970s, it has appeared to have undergone a resurgence.

Apart from its traditional definition, piracy also refers to copyright violations. Committed both in the United States and abroad, this form of piracy includes the unauthorized storage, reproduction, distribution, or sale of intellectual property—for example, music CDs, movie videocassettes, and even fashion designs. The term has been applied, in particular, to the piracy of computer software, which is highly susceptible to theft because of its ease of duplication. Estimates of the cost to copyright holders ranges in the billions of dollars annually. U.S. law protects copyright holders under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C.S. § 109 [1993]), and a 1992 federal law makes software piracy a felony (Pub. L. No. 102-561, 106 Stat. 4233, codified at 18 U.S.C.A. § 2319 [1988 & 1992 Supp.]). Since the 1990s, a number of international treaties and conventions, as well as diplomatic initiatives, have sought to forge greater cooperation among nations to combat such piracy.

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piracy

piracy. The oldest profession of the sea, piracy in British coastal waters by Saxon or north German seafarers may have become common by c. ad 400; with the Viking era, from c. ad 800, depredations by Norse adventurers became seasonal events. Essentially, however, piracy was pursued without the sanction of any higher authority unless, as was not infrequently the case, it had a measure of official connivance. This may partly explain why early sea laws in the west, which by implication place piracy ‘without the law’, do not seem to do so explicitly. In England, before the emergence of the Court of Admiralty in the 14th cent. the crown accorded substantial ‘self-regulation’ to the ports of the realm, but it did not do so lightly: in 1343 Edward III forthrightly condemned piracy in Dartmouth, for such abuse of foreign ships injured the royal preserve of relations with other states. An expanding sea-borne commerce, which in volume of shipping seems to have reached its first peak in England in about 1570, made piracy in waters which individual governments might pretend to control difficult if not impossible to counter. The quintessence of this situation lay in the Caribbean archipelagos of Spain's transatlantic empire, where a theoretical dominion was frequently challenged, and sometimes (Britain's treaty with Spain of 1670 is a case in point) with the active concurrence of Madrid. If there was a European precedent for the Spanish monopolistic approach it was in the Hanseatic League, with its self-protective commercial overlordship of northern waters in the 14th and 15th cents. Hanseatic power explains why English piracy flourished in the south-west, whence it reached into Biscay, the chief medieval source of salt and wine, rather than upon the coasts fronting the North Sea.

For all the dexterity and legalism of Elizabeth I's responses to Spanish allegations of piracy, it is inescapable that piracy there was; and that if government was a circumspect backer of Hawkins and Drake it was transparently a gainer from their daring. Elizabethan piracy was essentially a business venture, even if the force of a protestantism determined to challenge the papal award of the western hemisphere to Spain and the eastern to Portugal in 1494 should not be underrated. With the 17th cent. came piracy's great age in the West Indies. The Spanish need to purchase West African slaves from English and other slavers, Spain's extended communications which themselves invited rootless seafarers to prey upon cargoes of fabulous wealth, combined with the loose proprietorial hold on those islands Spain virtually conceded to Britain, such as New Providence in the Bahamas, or had lost to her through war, pre-eminently Jamaica. The heyday of Morgan, Teach (Blackbeard), Avery, Roberts, Kidd, though of hardly more than 50 years' duration, was symptomatic of Spain's equivocal self-defence in central America. Through her reforms at home, and a series of better-structured commercial treaties, institutional piracy did not recur in the later 18th cent., and had little place in South America's 19th-cent. independence movements.

The ‘internationalism’ in modern maritime law may stem from such 17th-cent. jurists as Grotius, but marine technology has so varied that law as to blur ‘old law and custom’. The submarine as a weapon of war in the early 20th cent., independent in operation as well as invisible, unable to afford assistance to torpedoed ships' companies, was plainly seen in some British circles as piracy re-emerging in a fresh and terrible guise. Only in 1917, with Germany's unrestricted U-boat war, did Britain cross the Rubicon and respond in kind.

David Denis Aldridge

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Piracy

Dictionary of American History
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc.

PIRACY

PIRACY. From the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts witnessed extensive acts of piracy against nations engaging in shipping and trade. From New England's earliest settlement, its shipping suffered from coastal piracy. In 1653 Massachusetts made piracy punishable by death, and governors sometimes sent out armed ships to attack offshore pirates. At the same time, however, colonial governors granted "privateering" commissions to sea desperadoes.

The Navigation Acts, passed by Great Britain between 1650 and 1696, halted all foreign ships from trading in the American colonies; this led to colonial smuggling and eventually to piracy. Colonial merchants and settlers bought pirates' stolen goods and thus obtained necessary commodities at a cheap price. New York, Philadelphia, and Newport, Rhode Island, were rivals in this scandalous trade, with Boston, Virginia, and the Carolinas also buying stolen goods. When Richard Coote, earl of Bellomont, became governor of New York and New England in 1697, he was ordered to "suppress the prevailing piracy" causing "so much distress along the coast." Coote found general colonial connivance with pirates, however, especially in New York, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia. One New York merchant secured $500,000 in seven years through promotion of piracy.

Piracy reached a peak during the period 1705–1725, and particularly between 1721 and 1724, when terror reigned on the New England coast. English men-of-war ended this peril, but after the American Revolution piratical attacks on U.S. ships by French "privateers" led to an undeclared war between France and the United States and contributed to the creation of the U.S. Navy. Piratical operations of English men-of-war on U.S. coasts and the high seas, including the impressment of American seamen, hastened the War of 1812. The period 1805–1825 witnessed a resurgence of piracy, which led to the expansion of the U.S. Navy, which was active suppressing piracy and convoying ships. More than three thousand instances of piracy were recorded between 1814 and 1824, half of them on U.S. shipping.

Beginning in 1805 the navy began warring on pirates on the Louisiana and Gulf coasts, a region long plagued by piracy. The Barataria pirates were driven out in 1814, and the Aury-Laffite pirates were purged from Galveston, Texas, in 1817. From 1816 to 1824 the United States

faced the perplexing problem of dealing with the piratical "privateers" of the new Latin American republics. Congress finally was so angered by these freebooters' depredations that in 1819 it passed an act prescribing the death penalty for piracy.

The Spaniards of Cuba and Puerto Rico sent out pirates who captured American ships, murdered their crews, and nearly brought on a war between the United States and the two Spanish colonies. Congress denounced this piracy in 1822, and in 1823 and 1824 it dispatched a strong naval squadron to suppress the pirates. By 1827 piracy had ended on all U.S. coasts.

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piracy

The Renaissance
COPYRIGHT 2008 Greenhaven

piracy

Piracy on the open seas dates back millennia, and was a common plague of merchant shipping in ancient Greece and Rome. Through the Middle Ages, Mediterranean pirates commonly hijacked cargoes as well as individuals, selling them into slavery or holding them for ransom. With small or nonexistent navies, weak central governments could do very little to suppress piracy. In the sixteenth century, with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, piracy in the Mediterranean posed even greater dangers. These corsairs, or Barbary Coast pirates, had been operating for centuries using fast, shallow-drafted ships that could outrun any large warship, and take shelter in bays or rivers where military ships could not go. Piracy was an important industry in Tunis, Algiers, and other Barbary Coast cities, where syndicates of wealthy investors sponsored voyages and divided the profits as well as hostage ransoms. The corsairs posed a constant threat to coastal towns in Sicily, Spain, and the southern coasts of Italy, and even raided in the Atlantic Ocean as far north as Iceland. Their piracy was often supported by ruling sultans, who protected the corsairs in port and built holding cells for hostages, who at one point numbered tens of thousands in the city of Algiers.

At the same time, piracy was spreading to the Caribbean and the Atlantic as new colonies were founded in the Americas, and treasure fleets transporting gold to Europe presented tempting targets. As nations competed for colonies and resources, the European monarchies began sponsoring pirates called privateers to undertake raids against the ships of their rivals. One of the most successful was Sir Francis Drake, commissioned a privateer by Queen Elizabeth I of England. Drake raided Spanish ports in the Caribbean and California, and fought in the queen's service during the campaign of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

The buccaneers, as they were also known after the French cooking grill known as a boucan, were hired by the governments of England, the Netherlands, and France for the purpose of harassing Spanish shipping to and from Spain's American colonies. The buccaneers formed a powerful military faction in the Caribbean region, and established protected bases in the Bahamas, Tortuga, Jamaica, and later Panama. Under Henry Morgan, pirate bands captured the major cities of Spanish-held Panama, including Portobelo and the city of Panama, a crucial link in the transportation of silver and gold from the Andes region to Spain. Their ranks were often increased by mutineers from British military ships, who escaped a miserable and dangerous existence for the chance to share in captured gold and loot.

Piracy also thrived in Asian waters. The Chinese pirate Pinyin Zheng Zhilong, after leaving the service of the Portuguese at Macau, raided Dutch shipping in the East Indies. Cheng Ch'eng Kuon seized the entire island of Formosa from the Portuguese, using it as a base for a long campaign of piracy in the South China Sea—a region that remains a dangerous hotbed of piracy in the twenty-first century.

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Jonsen, Captain boards ship taking seven children to England, seizes its valuables, and sails off with the children, who have their own piratical plans. [Br. Lit.: The Innocent Voyage (High Wind in Jamaica ) in Magill II, 488]

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pirate

pi·rate
/ ˈpīrət/
•
n.
a person who attacks and robs ships at sea. ∎
a person who appropriates or reproduces the work of another for profit without permission, usually in contravention of patent or copyright:
software pirates. ∎
a person or organization that broadcasts radio or television programs without official authorization:
[as adj.]
a pirate radio station.•
v. [tr.]
1.dated
rob or plunder (a ship).
2. [often as adj.] (pirated)
use or reproduce (another's work) for profit without permission, usually in contravention of patent or copyright:
he sold pirated tapes of Hollywood blockbustersa competing company cannot pirate its intellectual achievements.DERIVATIVES:pi·rat·ic
/ pīˈratik; pi-/ adj.pi·rat·i·cal
/ pīˈratikəl; pi-/ adj.pi·rat·i·cal·ly
/ pīˈratiklē; pi-/ adv.

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Piracy

Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History
COPYRIGHT 2000 The Gale Group Inc.

PIRACY

At the end of the twentieth century the term piracy held two distinct meanings. The first, the more historical meaning, refers to acts of plundering on the high seas. The second, the more modern meaning, refers to the theft of intellectual property, specifically copyright infringements against producers of computer software and entertainment programs such music CDs, movie videocassettes, and books.

Piracy on the high seas were acts committed by criminals against a shipping vessel, including hijacking the ship, stealing its cargo, or taking violent action against the crew. Acts of piracy along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts were prevalent from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth century. The U.S. Constitution made piracy a crime in Article 1, Section 8, and Congress in 1790 first enacted an anti-piracy law. The act banned murder and robbery at sea under the threat of the death penalty. Acts of piracy against U.S. ships off the coasts of Britain and continental Europe from 1803 to 1812 was a major factor leading to the War of 1812 (1812–1814). Piracy legislation from 1818 to 1847 laid the framework for modern anti-piracy law found predominantly in Title 18, Chapter 18, of the U.S. legal code. Twentieth-century international cooperation shaped unique jurisdictional agreement allowing pirates to be apprehended on the oceans by the officials of any nation and punished under that nation's law.

The second meaning of piracy is copyright violations, both in the United States and abroad. The Copyright Act of 1976 gives to the author the exclusive right to reproduce, display, distribute, and sell his original work. The International Intellectual Property Alliance's annual review of illegal copying of works estimated U.S. losses due to copyright piracy totaled approximately $12 billion in 1998. Computer software businesses suffered the highest loss. The People's Republic of China was a major offender. The Business Software Alliance and the Software and Information Industry Association estimated 40 percent of business applications in use worldwide in 1997 were pirated.

The growth of computer network communications, especially the global Internet, made illegal copying of expensive software easy and nearly untraceable. The Software Publishers Association, from its offices in Washington, D.C. and Paris, France, fights copyright infringement. Also, to combat such piracy, the 1990s saw increased international cooperation through meetings, diplomatic initiatives, and treaties.

See also:Barbary States

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piracy

pi·ra·cy
/ ˈpīrəsē/
•
n.
the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea. ∎
a similar practice in other contexts, esp. hijacking:
air piracy. ∎
the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work:
software piracy.

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